Tobi Amusan, very close to a sanction that could leave her without the World Cup and without the Olympic Games?

Until last year’s world athletics championships, nothing foreshadowed the formidable explosion that Tobi Amusan, a Nigerian sprinter specializing in the 100 meter hurdles race, had almost a year ago in Oregon.

Although she alternated some good isolated results -Diamond League titles in Zurich and Birmingham-, her most stable condition was that of being a multi-champion of her country. In a race dominated historically and sometimes hegemonically by North American athletes, her fourth place in the final of the Tokyo Olympic Games, after winning the series and the semifinals, made her the typical competitor who, on someone else’s bad day, could climb any podium.

As of July of last year, ready for the big World Athletics event, Tobi had a respectable personal best of 12:41 and a record of 11 wins out of 17 races between March and the time of the ecumenical tournament. Most of those wins are below the Diamond League level.

In short, a good competitor with clear aspirations as a finalist and eventually a bronze podium.

However, in the qualifiers, it was already clear that she had something special with her. She won the preliminary with a record of 12:40, a new personal best and a continental record. It is usually a symptomatic sign that an elite athlete who usually manages certain levels of demand achieves the best personal record in a first round.

Not only did she dare to go deep in her debut, but she repeated in the semifinals without caring too much that, a little later, she would have to be ready for the decisive competition.

The clock was 12:12 p.m., 8 hundredths faster than the North American Kendra Harrison, the protagonist of that strange story before the Rio games in which, after being left out of the tournament in her country’s trials, she broke the world record in London, a few days before the Rio event.

With the Americans Nia Ali and Alysha Johnson disqualified in the first phase, the big challenge for Amusan was not to be overcome by the presence of the Olympic champion, the Puerto Rican Jasmine Camacho Quinn, or to be overwhelmed by the great goal of the world title.

No one could handle it. And she ran even faster than in the morning, although her 12:06s were not approved for wind assistance.

Since then, Amusan has dosed her participation and in 2023 she won a new Diamond title in Oslo and swept the last five events so far this year, the last being, a few hours ago, in the Gyulai Istvan classic, precisely in Budapest, the capital of Hungary that will soon host a new world championship. World cup that, perhaps, she may not be able to compete in.

Yesterday, Amusan herself made an impact with an announcement on her social media: she was temporarily suspended for having been unreachable on the three occasions that the International Athletics Federation (World Athletics) required her for doping control over the course of a year.

Amusan, 26, will not be able to compete -for now- in any tournament until the final resolution and will have the opportunity to give explanations before a court, just before the next World Cup, which starts in August in Budapest.

In the same statement, the Nigerian woman stated that she never used banned drugs to improve her performance and hopes to be authorized in time for the World Championships: “I am a clean athlete and regularly (perhaps more than usual) I undergo tests by the Comprehensive Athletics Unit (AIU). I was tested a few days after my third missed test,” Amusan wrote on her Instagram account.

The AIU officially confirmed the case a few hours after the publication of Amusan. The Comprehensive Athletics Unit operates independently of World Athletics. It performs activities such as test-taking, investigations, intelligence, case management, communication, and education.

Although the dates and circumstances under which anti-doping agents were unable to find Amusan are still unknown, the reality is that athletes are required to register on a mobile application called Adams where in the world they can be located at least for one hour each day of the year. Repeated absence presupposes guilt. In accordance with the World Athletics anti-doping rules, the applicable penalty for this contravention is two years, subject to a reduction to one year depending on the degree of the offense. This regulation leaves her with great concern in her Olympic dream, since athletics in Paris 2024 will start in just over a year.

As is often the case with unforeseen events, at the time of the victory in Oregon, some experts stated that Amusan’s record came as a result of the model of its sneakers, manufactured by one of the major sportswear brands and designed for long-distance races instead of speed races. The soles contain a layer of carbon rods and foam, raising questions about whether that shoe had given her an unfair advantage on the Hayward Field track.

However, this tendency to not be present in three out-of-competition controls is something that has cost more than one of Tobi’s colleagues a major headache.

By the way, since the No Show situation leaves everything open to suspicion, the question that remains for me, from a mixture of curiosity and ignorance, is that, if there is neither a urine sample nor a test in this regard, we could be in the presence of a sanction for nothing. For a little while. Or for a lot.